anufacture largely both bricks and tiles. There are lots
of waste ground by the side of the roads in every village, amounting
often to village greens, where feed the pigs and ganders of the people;
and these roads are old-fashioned, homely roads, very dirty and badly
made, and hardly endurable in winter, but still pleasant jog-trot roads
running through the great pasture-lands, dotted here and there with
little clumps of thorns, where the sleek kine are feeding, with no fence
on either side of them, and a gate at the end of each field, which makes
you get out of your gig (if you keep one), and gives you a chance of
looking about you every quarter of a mile.

One of the moralists whom we sat under in our youth--was it the great
Richard Swiveller, or Mr. Stiggins--says, "We are born in a vale, and
must take the consequences of being found in such a situation." These
consequences I, for one, am ready to encounter. I pity people who
weren't born in a vale. I don't mean a flat country; but a vale--that
is, a flat country bounded by hills. The having your hill always in view
if you choose to turn towards him--that's the essence of a vale. There
he is for ever in the distance, your friend and companion. You never
lose him as you do in hilly districts.

And then what a hill is the White Horse Hill! There it stands right up
above all the rest, nine hundred feet above the sea, and the boldest,
bravest shape for a chalk hill that you ever saw. Let us go up to the
top of him, and see what is to be found there. Ay, you may well wonder
and think it odd you never heard of this before; but wonder or not, as
you please, there are hundreds of such things lying about England, which
wiser folk than you know nothing of, and care nothing for. Yes, it's a
magnificent Roman camp, and no mistake, with gates and ditch and mounds,
all as complete as it was twenty years after the strong old rogues left
it. Here, right up on the highest point, from which they say you can see
eleven counties, they trenched round all the table-land, some twelve or
fourteen acres, as was their custom, for they couldn't bear anybody to
overlook them, and made their eyrie. The ground falls away rapidly on
all sides. Was there ever such turf in the whole world? You sink up to
your ankles at every step, and yet the spring of it is delicious. There
is always a breeze in the "camp," as it is called; and here it lies,
just as the Romans left it, except that cairn on the east